Saturday, 30 January 2016

When I first heard the expression on BBC World Service news,
it conjured a picture of two sulky, sullen infants standing at opposite sides
of the room while a referee-ing adult stands between them saying things like ‘Mary.
say you’re sorry.’ Mary, looking fixedly at the floor, mutters, just audibly
and with obvious insincerity, ‘Sorry’.

‘That’s better, Mary. Now, Johnny, you say you’re sorry too.’

‘Sorry.’

‘What did you say?’ ‘SORRY fuck it.’

‘Now, children, I hope neither of you has their fingers
crossed.’ (Both children blush.) ‘I’m going out of the room now, and I don’t
want to hear another word.’

Adult leaves, and hostilities continue as before, but more
stealthily.

This, it turns out, is almost exactly how it is. One wants
to laugh, but then remembers that these children have guns and bombs.

Friday, 29 January 2016

I see my post about 'Park Bench Therapy' is very popular, especially in Poland. It reminds me of those occasions, typically on long train journeys, in which there is just one other person in one's compartment, whom you know you are never likely to see again. The scenario seems to invite soul-baring; the making of confidences one would hesitate to make elsewhere. This can be as effective, I think, as a session with a psychoanalyst.

Thursday, 28 January 2016

We have all had the experience — needing to rest one’s legs
or lungs, one sits on a public bench. Then someone comes along and sits beside
one. very often one shifts to the other end of the bench, all too often
justified in one’s fear that he’s a loony or an alcoholic who will, if you let
him, hoover up all your psychic energy. But sometimes an interesting
conversation ensues, in which one, or both, bares his soul to the stranger,
with beneficial results.

Somewhere in Africa — Zimbabwe or Zaire (is Zaire in Africa?
Am I not ashamed of my ignorance? Yes, I am) — there is a large psychiatric
clinic, and it’s not hard to imagine that people — especially those who most
need its services — are reluctant to go in. And if, as seems likely, what is
offered is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, their reluctance is justified: if
you’re not a conventional bore before CBT, you will be if it’s ‘successful’.

This place, however, has ‘discovered’ a cheap effective
therapy, one moreover that bypasses the fear of entering the building: they
have put a bench outside. Just a bench; I hope it has been left plain and
anonymous, looking like and indeed used as a handy place to sit down while
strolling round the grounds or having a crafty fag. It is special only in its
function:

When you’ve been sitting on it a little while, someone who
is in fact a psychotherapist will come and sit beside you and engage you in
conversation. Conversation that could be called, or very soon becomes,
analytically oriented psychotherapy, which is, provided the ‘Evidence-based
Statisticians’ don’t turn up like lepidopterists with killing bottles to
‘prove’ otherwise, the most long-term effective treatment for those in psychic
trouble.

I suppose classic Freudian therapists could sit right at one
end of the bench while the ‘patient’ lies on it, but probably best is the
scenario of two people having a chat after meeting ‘by chance’ on a park bench.

(A small personal note — at my prep school there was a
broken-down sofa near the headmaster’s office. You were sent to sit on it if
you’d done something ‘wrong’. Sooner or later the headmaster would come out of
his office and beat you. But that’s just a personal horror I wanted to get off
my chest, or other bodily location. Please try to forget it now.)

A park bench doesn’t cost very much. Probably less than a
few packets of Fluoxetine. Indeed, one could quickly be made by an in-patient
in occupational therapy, or an out-patient or well-wisher who liked woodwork.
Wouldn’t it be great if such benches appeared outside every psychiatric clinic?
Cheap, almost free, psychotherapy.

But no; at best the NHS would formalize and ‘Monetise’ it,
giving ‘Bench Appointments’ for three month’s time. More likely they’d sneer
at the whole idea and continue going to luxury ‘conferences’ where they are
persuaded to stuff patients with the latest expensive psychopharmaceutical
brain-benders.

Wednesday, 27 January 2016

Sorry not to have written anything recently; as soon as I have something notable to write about I shall do so. Meanwhile, readership has nevertheless suddenly increased: the 'Russians' are reading this blog again. As I explained before, I put 'Russians' in inverted commas because Google still seems to think 'Russia' means 'All the countries of the former Soviet Union, from the Caucasus and Urals to Kamchatka and Siberia.' Anyway, wherever you are, welcome.

Monday, 25 January 2016

The Ophicleide is a great rasping and farting low-pitched
brass instrument — keyed, rather than having the valves of all modern brass
instruments except the saxophones (though they are classed as woodwind, for all
that they are made of brass — In Romania there exists a wooden soprano
saxophone, and I saw one of these in a music shop in Athens shortly after the
fall of Ceausescu, when all sorts of weird and wonderful Romanian items were
coming into Greece. The shop’s proprietors were intrigued and persuaded me to
play a few notes on it; it sounded very strange, though not at all like the
clarinet it superficially resembles. I regret now not having bought it, but in
the shop there was also a valve trombone, an instrument I love, and if I bought
all the instruments I want to my house would resemble Snow’s Hill Manor (see
further down) and besides I was in Athens to buy a normal alto saxophone. But I
digress, in fact I digress from my digression, but no matter — this whole blog
is a farrago of nested digressions) — the distinction between keyed and valved
wind instruments needs another essay; back to the ophicleide: Berlioz has a
part for ophicleide in his most popular work, the Symphonie Fantastique, but
it’s almost always played on the tuba. The excellent John Eliot Gardiner did a
recording with a specially assembled orchestra using all the right instruments
of the time, including an ophicleide and the full version of the cornet
obbligato in the ballroom movement, but a girlfriend made off with my copy of
the CD, which is no longer in the catalogues. She almost certainly doesn’t even
appreciate what she stole; another reason she is no longer in my catalogue.

I have only ever seen one ophicleide; it was at Snow’s Hill
Manor in Oxfordshire or is it Gloucestershire. The previous owner of the place
— it now belongs to the National Trust — was a meta-collector; a collector of
collections, including one of musical instruments. This ophicleide had a bell
shaped like the gaping mouth of a serpent — ‘Ophicleide’ is Greek for ‘Keyed
serpent’ though the actual serpent is a quite other woodwind instrument, also keyed. (Is that clear? No of course not;
never mind.) Fortunately or unfortunately, the NT wouldn’t let me play the
thing, though I do know how to.

I put in a picture of an ophicleide the other day. Here’s
another picture of two ophicleides, with two serpents to the left of them. In fact
these too are in the Snowshill (as it seems it’s spelt) collection:

Sunday, 24 January 2016

I hope all this stuff about the great Hector Berlioz is not
boring my readers. Well no actually I couldn’t give a nun’s wimple if it is; what’s the point of having a blog if
you can’t write about whatever you like?

Since before the time of Bach, keyboard proficiency, indeed
often virtuosity, has been the general rule for composers. In this as in so
much else Berlioz was an exception; he couldn’t play the piano for toffee. He
could play the flute a little, also the guitar; he had a very nice guitar which
had belonged to Paganini, small-bodied as they often were at that time. (Guitars,
not Violinists; don’t be silly.) Nevertheless, he knew the abilities and
limitations of just about every instrument you can think of, and several that
you can’t. In fact he wrote a big (but eccentric of course) book on
instrumentation; how best to use all these instruments in orchestral writing.
Even so, he sometimes went awry: having just written a long exposed passage for
trombone in D flat major — that’s five flats; I think it might have been the
magnificent solo at the beginning of the second movement of the Symphonie
Funèbre et Triomphale — he panicked and dashed out to accost a passing
trombonist and ask if playing it were feasible. The trombonist laughed at him,
though not of course in the cruel way Harriet Smithson had done, and assured
him that in fact D flat was quite a comfortable key for the trombone; the usual
tenor instrument has, as it were, two flats ‘built in’ already. (I could
explain that, but it would need a longish essay on the history of brass
instruments.)

Among the instruments you probably can’t think of was the ophicleide, which I mentioned the other day.
But I think this must wait; I know you have pathetically tiny attention spans.
Oh and you like pictures; here is a trombone:

Saturday, 23 January 2016

I have to interrupt the present series of posts about
Berlioz because something one couldn’t make up has just happened in England.

People used to make jokes about British Railways, the
national rail network that served the whole of Britain (that’s England,
Scotland, and Wales) so well before dear Mrs T. carved it up and sold it to so
many different money-making companies that it became impossible to find the one
responsible when things, as they always do, went wrong.

No-one makes jokes any more; even I could not be as
tasteless as that when the cost-cutting money-grabbing of rail companies has
caused many deaths, including those of people I knew. But the latest idiocy
will only hurt football fans so one may laugh:

A special railway station has been opened to serve a large
football stadium in the English Midlands. It was announced today that it will
not open when there is a football match as there would be too many people and
it would cost too much.

Friday, 22 January 2016

My correspondent John Fletcher, who is a professor of French
Literature, writes to correct me about that Berlioz symphony: seems it was
actually all about a different insurrection; the one of 1830. Sorry about that.

In the same message he mentions a colleague who, in spite of
a slight defect in his sense of humour, (he was German you see), was good at
making up rude limericks in English. Reading this must have tripped the
micro-switch on the limerick engine at the back of my brain/mind, because
around 2.30 a.m. when, as usual, I couldn’t sleep, the following popped out:

A musician who hailed from MadrasStuffed an ophicleide right up
his arse.He suffered for art,But his F minor fartWas heard right up the Khyber
Pass.

Ophicleide? I’ll tell you next time I write about Berlioz,
but meanwhile here’s a picture of one:

Thursday, 21 January 2016

I would have said more about Berlioz yesterday, but a couple
of friends dropped in for a whisky (or two, or three), so it had to wait.

Berlioz’s memoirs are as interesting as his music. When a
centime-less music student, he fell in love with Harriet Smithson, a little
red-haired Irish actress in a visiting troupe of Shakespeare players, and
proposed to her. With the gratuitous heartless cruelty of her sex she laughed
at him; with the petulant hurt pride of his he told her that one day he would
win the Prix Du Rome and become France’s greatest composer, and then she would
be sorry.

He won the Prix Du Rome and became France’s greatest
composer, and she was sorry. He proposed to her again, and this time she
accepted him. It would be nice to add “And they lived happily ever after,” but
I’m afraid they didn’t.

More later, unless I happen to come across something even
more interesting to write about. (The discovery of a new planet doesn’t do much
for me; the discovery of a new Bach manuscript might.)

Wednesday, 20 January 2016

I have just been listening again to a recording by the Odense (would that in fact be Odessa?) Symphony Orchestra of Berlioz's 'Grande Symphonie Funebre et Triomphale', written for the re-interment with honours of some heroes of the French Revolution. It's a work that's not often heard, but is well worth seeking out. You can find the recording I mentioned on YouTube. It is characterised more by enthusiasm than accuracy, but is none the worse for that.

Sunday, 17 January 2016

My last post was about an extraordinary book published in 1903, in which a Mr Warder presented his 'ideas' about the electric nature of life, the universe, and everything. Since I don't feel like writing about anything much just now I thought I'd give you what might be called the title abstract of his book:

The universe is a vast electric machine or
organism creating its
own cosmic force, lighting and heating itself from its ownlatent
electric fires, and bound together by invisible electric bands pulling
and guiding with the swiftness of lightning, and the power and wisdom
of Omnipotence.

Even the great Nikola Tesla didn't go that far, but then he wasn't merely an armchair scientist; he tried his ideas out. Here's a picture of Nikola, doing just that:

Saturday, 16 January 2016

…is a dangerous thing, or at
least a misleading one. Among the odder items in my current reading is a book
called ‘The Universe a Vast Electric Organism’ by George Woodward Warder,
published in 1903.

One early evening Mr Warder
called in his servant to light the gas-lamps. In walking to the lamp the
servant deliberately shuffled his way across the thick carpet and then, instead
of lighting a match, simply held his finger close to the gas jet, whereupon a
spark jumped across the gap and lit the gas. Using his little learning, and no
doubt observing other phenomena of what those with a little more learning know as
static electricity, Mr Warder set about writing this extraordinary farrago of
speculation.

In a way of course Mr Warder
was right: the universe is full of electricity, because it is composed of
atoms, and round the nuclei of
atoms whiz electrons, which can be dislodged by, say, shuffling across the
carpet. Being now a touch short of electrons, the servant was in a state of
electrical tension; tension that was relieved when he brought his finger to the
gas-jet, which, being connected via its pipe to that huge reservoir of
electrons the earth, made good the shortage by sending some spare electrons
across the gap; their rapid passage heated the space in between sufficiently to
light the gas.

Now all this remained most mysterious until various pioneers
started making their researches, which with any luck were rather more rigorous
and a little bit less fantastic than Mr Warder’s. The trouble is, between about
the time of Benjamin Franklin and the time of the great Nikola Tesla, the field
was open to all sorts of entertaining loonies whose minds were so open their
brains had dropped out.

Never mind; it’s all good harmless fun. And perhaps in fifty
years people will laugh about what we currently ‘know’ about electricity: “‘Electrons’
indeed!”

Here’s a more spectacular example of a discharge of static
electricity:

Friday, 15 January 2016

Forgive the inverted commas; I shall explain. The Google
blog system allows me to see, day by day or week by week, where my readers are,
listed by number of people (or number of times the blog is looked at — it could
be one person, many times a day) per country. Quite suddenly over the last week
or two, lots of people in what Google calls Russia are reading this blog, even
though I have been too busy with other things to write many blog entries. It
also provides a little map of the world, with the countries shaded in
progressively darker green according to those numbers. But Google seems to have
an outdated view of what ‘Russia’ is — the dark green stretches from west of
the Caucasus all the way to the straits separating Asia from Alaska, and
including many central Asian countries that are not in fact Russia. ‘Russia’,
for Google, seems still to mean ‘The Former Soviet Union’. Hardly surprising
from an organization which pretends not to have heard of intellectual property
rights and whose founders don’t know how to spell ‘Googol’.

Anyway, greetings to you all. Keep reading, and I shall try
to post items that may interest you.

Wednesday, 13 January 2016

I am currently translating into English ‘The Notary’ by the
Greek writer Alexandros Ragavis. Set and written in the early nineteenth
century, about the time of the Greek war of independence from the Turks, the
story takes place in the Ionian island of Kephallonia. A fairly complicated
plot involves faked wills, murder, night escapes on horseback or by boat, and a
last-minute rescue from the gallows. In this it resembles the roughly contemporary stories of Wilkie Collins and Sheridan Lefanu. For all the complications of an antiquated
style of Greek, Kephallonian dialect and the sprinkling of Italian words
typical of the Ionian islands, I’m finding the story gripping. It will be
published by the excellent small Athenian publisher Aiora, which specialises in
Modern or near-Modern Greek classics, both poetry and prose, translated
(usually with the original on facing pages) into various other European
languages. But first I have to translate it; a slow and difficult job.

Here is an only slightly relevant picture of a 1919 meeting
of ‘Parnassus’; a Greek literary society. If you know the Greek alphabet you might be able to puzzle out the names of those present.

Saturday, 9 January 2016

BBC English — the English spoken by the BBC’s announcers —
has from the first days of broadcasting been recognized, both in Britain and
abroad, as the standard; held up as an example for learners. Teachers of
English as a foreign language advise their students to emulate what they hear on BBC World Service, to which I myself listen every
morning that short wave reception allows it. Here, for instance, is an example
from this morning’s news bulletin:

Friday, 8 January 2016

Just as thirty children trying to get on with their studies
can have them disrupted by one ill-brought-up brat clamouring for attention, so
the rest of the world has been distracted from its serious concerns by the
Americans squabbling over their lethal toys.

There has been much talk of the second amendment, which most
people seem to think enshrines ‘The right to bear arms’. Those five words are
usually the only ones quoted.

But what does the second amendment actually say? Absurdly
for a document that has the same status for an American redneck as the Koran
has for a Muslim fundamentalist, there seems to be no recognized Ur-Text for
the American constitution: one can choose between several versions. Sure, most
say more or less the same things, but lawyers and killers thrive on the ‘More
or less.’

The version given in Akhil Reed Amar’s huge and
authoritative study ‘America’s Constitution’ is:

‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security
of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be
infringed.’

That, in spite of the extra capitals and over-punctuation typical
of the ill-educated, is crystal clear: the right to bear arms is conditional on
the need for a militia. But America now has a police force, (albeit one that
keeps shooting unarmed black people, but that’s another story). It no longer
needs — as it may have done when the second amendment was first written — a
militia.

Thursday, 7 January 2016

John Lucas, himself a poet, and proprietor of the admirable
Shoestring Press, (all the more admirable for having brought out a couple of my
things), has just written a book on George Crabbe. I’ve always thought Crabbe
tedious; he wrote long poems about village life and, with very few exceptions,
anything much longer than a page isn’t really poetry; it’s verse. But if John
thinks Crabbe worthy of a book then I should investigate, so I climbed on a
chair to reach the ‘C’s in my poetry shelves. I found just one little
paperback, published in 1886 by Cassell. There is an introduction by Professor
Henry Morley, and this contains a startling revelation — one that might partly
explain why Benjamin Britten and E.M. Forster were so interested in him — about
the time Crabbe spent apprenticed to a G.P.:

‘Crabbe swept out the surgery, carried out medicine, and
slept with the ploughboy.’

Wednesday, 6 January 2016

I grew up in the sixties, which started in about 1964 and
lasted almost until 1980. I very much recommend my friend Jenny Diski’s book on
the sixties, called (duh) ‘The Sixties’.

It has been memorably said of the sixties that if you can
remember them, you weren’t there. Not quite true; the point of the remark is
that we were all so stoned out of our skulls that much of what we remember may
not ‘really’ have happened, and much may really have happened that we (perhaps
mercifully) can’t remember.

One of the many good effects of the sixties for those who
survived them is a familiarity with drugs, especially the psychotropic ones,
both ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’. An intelligent and responsible veteran of
the sixties (and there are lots of us) could safely be given a copy of the
Merck Index and a prescription pad and allowed to medicate himself and selected
friends. We know what we’re doing: if we didn’t we’d all have been dead long
ago.

So I can tell you that it’s a myth that you ‘shouldn’t’
drink alcohol while taking powerful prescription drugs; that they don’t mix.
Bullshit. They mix as well as tonic (or angostura bitters) with gin. That even
goes — with a few exceptions, such as those prescribed against Helicobacter
pylori, the cause of stomach ulcers — for antibiotics. What actually happens is
that the alcohol makes the drugs work better, or at least more quickly, and
vice-versa. It is only a pusillanimous and moralistic medical fraternity,
afraid we might overdo it or worse still enjoy ourselves, that tries to tell us
otherwise.

Tuesday, 5 January 2016

Once again, sorry not to have written anything here. Fact is, that in spite of more than fifty years experience riding motorcycles, I have crashed three times in the last three weeks, and quite apart from the (minor) physical injuries, I am very shaken and have been unable to do much at all; not even piano practice, though that is, partly, another story.
Anyway, meanwhile here is a picture, taken many years ago, of my very favourite motorcycle; one I built myself from the bits of several. (Nevertheless it is in fact a standard model; the Velocette Venom Clubman.)

Sunday, 3 January 2016

In a couple of months, if all goes according to plan,
President Obama of the United States will be visiting Cuba. ‘It is thought’ (as
the BBC and even the VOA so cautiously put it) that Obama will urge an
improvement in Cuba’s human rights record.

Yes indeed. There is a concentration camp in Cuba where
people are held indefinitely — often for many years; some have died in
captivity — without trial; without even any specific charge. They are kept in
small cages rather than ‘proper’ cells, and they are relentlessly tortured to
extract ‘confessions’.

This concentration camp is in Guantanamo Bay. That’s in
Cuba, but it’s not controlled by the Cuban Government. It belongs to the
American Government. The prison, its officers, its torturers, are American.

Friday, 1 January 2016

Bravo Microsoft, Another Own Goal

Happy New Year, everybody.

I’m sorry about the slight shortage of blog posts recently.
It’s not because I’ve had nothing to say, (that’ll be the day), but largely
because Internet Explorer (A Microsoft product, and the default web browser in
computers using Windows) suddenly, without warning, became incapable of opening
my blog in such a way as to allow me to edit it. Reasoning that even Microsoft,
which shows a remarkable indifference to the wishes of its users, must surely
by now be aware of the problem it has made, I reluctantly accepted the
‘Upgrade’ to I.E. 11 with which it has been for some time importuning me.
This made no difference, except of course for causing various system conflicts.
(Par for the course for Microsoft Updates.) So I investigated various online
fora and found that, as expected, people all over the world have been having
the same problem. No-one, least of all Microsoft, has found a cure. The usual
advice on these fora is to use another web browser, and this I now have to do.

In general, Bill Gates and
his Microsoft are the worst thing that has ever happened to computers.